Cloning Desktops

Here is where I'm going to note everything down for when I do fresh installs to have everything the way I wanted it to go. I'll note down any interesting problems, configurations, or have scripts for this single purpose.

Preseeds

I'm extremely interested in preseeds as they are the bread and butter of automated installations without a human's hand. The preseed I possess now does basic installation of a desktop environment, with root automatically disabled, and some packages being installed.

I found a neat reasource to configure preseeds the below link serves as a guide to configure custom preseeds by providing documentation on various distributions of Debian. Collection

Here's all I have for now

links:

Specific packgaes:

  • build-essentials
  • vim-nox [Text Editor]
  • tlp [Laptops only]
  • virtual machine manager, and other goodies bring from KVM to get proper virtual machine working
  • Docker engine
  • Steam [Personal Desktop]
  • Discord [Personal Desktop]

Network Card Issues

  • Distribution: Debian (Bookworm)
  • ASUS PCE-AC56 AC1300 Network Card

On 12/13/24, I started my transition and dissociation from Windows by dual booting Linux and Windows. With my laptop daily driving Debian, and having no issues whatsoever, I had high confidence I wouldn't run into issues when installing Debian onto my main PC. Until it said I had no internet connection, so I plugged in an ethernet and continued the installation. Everything works, except for the fact my network card was not working correctly. This was an interesting case of driver issues since the system was recognizing the device in the pci expansion slot but refused to work with it. Here are the steps I took to get the card working with the system.

First, I tested to see if the card is being detected. This is verified with the lspci command searching for Network specficially. In addition, this gives extra information that may be useful. (Get sample output)

`lspci -vvnn | grep Network`

Secondly, I checked my current repositories for anything related to the chipset mentioned by the lspci command. This returned two packages, which I installed but no luck. So I removed those packages and searched the official Debian wiki on this chipset that my network card had (BCM4352). This then led me to the proper solution, which I outline below with an explanation for why this worked since it wasn't clear to me why I needed to complete these steps.

  1. Adding Extra sources to sources.list
    • Modified sources by adding non-free to deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware **non-free** in /etc/apt/sources.list.
    • I was curious on this step because I thought Debian had all stable and up-to-date packages under one repoistory, but this threw a wrench in my assumption.
    • According to research, this is because the package I needed contained software that differs from Debian's adherence to free software. This means the package I installed had software that didn't adhere to Debian's commitment to free software, likely a differing license, use of closed-source code, or some other violation of Debian's Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) that makes it "non-free".
  2. Installing the proper package, broadcom-sta-dkms in my case
    • Update the system, then install broadcom-sta-dkms which allows us to build the wl module for the network card. This is the actual package that is hidden within the non-free repo that I need for my network card.
  3. Removing the conflicting packages
    • Self-explanatory, to ensure proper functionality use modprobe to remove the conflicting packages
    • modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcmsmac bcma
  4. Activating the package
    • Use modprobe to activate the package module so the network card is used
    • modprobe wl
  5. Testing if it worked
    • Removed Ethernet, internet still on as indicated by my desktop environment
    • Used ip a to see if a new network interface was created, and there was
    • Used Ping to test the connectivity for the new interface